It is common in practice to have a grouped set of articles, such as beverage containers or the like, held together by shrink film in order to be able to prevent the set from shifting or from coming undone during a transport. Bundles comprising four, six, or more containers, for example, are known from the prior art. Such bundles continue to be one of the most frequent variants of sales units for beverage container or bottles of PET plastic. It is therefore desirable to assemble such bundles as quickly as possible without interruption of individual process steps in order to be able to achieve a high throughput.
Apparatuses and methods are already known that unwind the packaging material or, as the case may be, the shrink film from one or more rolls in order to supply the material to the bundles. Hereupon, the individual bundles or, as the case may be, the particular articles provided for the bundle, are wrapped into the packaging material. The unwinding of the packaging material from the roll can be carried out by machine. Apparatuses are known, which, for example, extract the packaging material from the roll by way of rollers, with the particular roll being meanwhile rotatingly moved. After the supply of packaging material on a roll is depleted, the roll in question has to be exchanged by or replaced with a new roll. This involves an undesirable interruption of the process of assembling the bundles.
A method and an apparatus by which new reels can be supplied and depleted reels can be exchanged are known, for example, from DE 40 40 545 A1. This known apparatus has a plurality of reels arranged side by side for supplying strip material. The core of the reels is in each case positioned on a common pin. A beginning section of the strip material is previously brought into contact with a roller, which extracts the strip material from the particular reel and guides it in a downward direction away from the apparatus. In order to be able to operate the apparatus according to DE 40 40 545 A1 and to unwind the material from the roll, the roll has to be positioned rotation-direction-conformingly with its core on the pin. The strip material or, as the case may be, the first layer of the strip material has to dip coming from above toward the rollers. If the roll were positioned on the pin in counterrotating direction, the strip material could not, or only with difficulty, be extracted from the roll, resulting in complications for unwinding. In apparatuses according to DE 40 40 545 A1, a manual and rotation-conforming positioning is therefore necessary in order to ensure disruption-free operation.
An apparatus is moreover known from DE 10 2004 026 312 A1 with a foil splicing station where the foil web of a new roll that is mounted into a packaging machine is transferred with the support of a holding device to a sealing device. The holding device can, in particular, be formed as a manually operable clamping strip, with the aid of which a foil beginning can be extracted from a new roll and provided to a transfer device, which can supply the foil beginning to a sealing device, by which the foil beginning is heat-sealed to a foil web that is already located in the packaging machine. The clamping strip is described there as an implement that is easy to handle for bringing the foil web into an appropriate position. The clamping strip is loose, however, that is, it is not linked to the machine or to the sealing device.
An at least partly automated method for roll replacement and a corresponding apparatus is known from DE 10 2013 110 944 A1. Here, the new foil rolls to be supplied to a packaging machine are in each case fitted onto differently configured exchangeable carrier units, which can be mounted in the packaging machine alternately in different installation positions. In this context, it is superfluous to supply a free foil end of the new rolls manually, because the exchangeable carrier units are configured in such a manner that the foil sections can be attached to each other in the machine automatically.
One object of the present invention in view of the known prior art is to provide an apparatus and a method for handling flat material and/or film material that is wound onto rolls, by which apparatus and method the susceptibility to disruption of a packaging machine can be reduced. The apparatus according to the invention and the method according to the invention it is moreover intended to facilitate handling of flat material and/or film material.